From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Chang, a former Beijing correspondent for the Wall Street Journal, explores the urban realities and rural roots of a community, until now, as unacknowledged as it is massive—China's 130 million workers whose exodus from villages to factory and city life is the largest migration in history. Chang spent three years following the successes, hardships and heartbreaks of two teenage girls, Min and Chunming, migrants working the assembly lines in Dongguan, one of the new factory cities that have sprung up all over China. The author's incorporation of their diaries, e-mails and text messages into the narrative allows the girls—with their incredible ambition and youth—to emerge powerfully upon the page. Dongguan city is itself a character, with talent markets where migrants talk their way into their next big break, a lively if not always romantic online dating community and a computerized English language school where students shave their heads like monks to show commitment to their studies. A first generation Chinese-American, Chang uses details of her own family's immigration to provide a vivid personal framework for her contemporary observations. A gifted storyteller, Chang plumbs these private narratives to craft a work of universal relevance. (Oct. 7)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From The New Yorker
China is in the midst of history is largest human migration, a hundred and thirty million of its citizens having left their home villages in search of urban employment. Chang, an American of Chinese descent, explores the migrant experience and the burden of being Chinese through the lives of several young women in the industrial city of Dongguan. Their Sisyphean attempts at self-reinvention are both entertaining and poignant; the most ambitious of them achieves modest success selling dubious health products, before falling under the spell of an American raw-food guru. In her diary, she reminds herself, We can be ordinary but we must not be vulgar. Chang is fine prose and her keen sense of detail more than compensate for the occasional digression, and her book is an intimate portrait of a strange and hidden landscape, a universe of relentless motion.
Copyright ©2008 Click here to subscribe to The New Yorker
From Bookmarks Magazine
When it comes to global economics, Leslie T. Chang knows both sides of the equation well—that is, from the vastly different perspectives of East and West. Her readable, compelling account of human migration in Factory Girls will open many eyes, particularly in her in-depth profiles of young women who face nearly intolerable working conditions and ruthless competition ("People who are too honest in this society will lose out," the instructor of a turnkey school told Chang) as they struggle to make their way. Chang's own ancestors are on the periphery, and the author ably recounts her family's varied, tragic past in the context of a story whose ripples will surely have global repercussions in the coming years. The only complaint? Chang's own family story is worthy of its own book.
Copyright 2008 Bookmarks Publishing LLC
From Booklist
To American girls, the term “going out” means dating; to their Chinese counterparts, however, it means leaving their remote villages and migrating hundreds of miles to industrial cities to find work within the closed societies of assembly-line factories. Of Chinese ancestry herself, Wall Street Journal reporter Chang was allowed nearly unprecedented access to the sweatshops where the majority of the world’s consumer goods are produced. Following several young women as they move from job to job, Chang reveals a world of naked ambition and abject loneliness, of grueling hours and spartan living conditions, of moral compromise and ethical ambiguity. In spite of such harsh conditions, however, these young women prefer the freedom factory life provides, and fail to return to their villages to fulfill their traditional roles as wives and mothers. Making it nearly impossible to blithely use a mobile phone or strap on a pair of running shoes ever again, Chang’s portrait underscores the reality that the global economy rests on some very slender shoulders. --Carol Haggas
Review
“Engrossing. . . an exceptionally vivid and compassionate depiction of the day-to-day dramas, and the fears and aspirations, of the real people who are powering China’s economic boom.”
–The New York Times Book Review
“Chang delves deeply into the world of migrant workers to find out who these people are and what their collective dislocation means for China. Chang skillfully sketches migrants as individuals with their own small victories and bitter tragedies, and she captures the surprising dynamics of this enormous but ill-understood subculture.”
–The Washington Post
“Chang’s deeply affecting book tells the story of the invisible foot soldiers who made China’s stirring rise possible.”
–The New York Times
“This is an irresistible book.”
–People
“Excellent.”
–Chicago Tribune
“Fascinating. . . Chang powerfully conveys the individual reality behind China’s 130 million migrant workers, the largest migration in human history.”
–The Boston Globe
“Chang reveals a world staggering in its dimensions, unprecedented in its topsy-turvy effects on China’s conservative culture, and frenetic in its pace. . . Chang deftly weaves her own family’s story of migrations within China, and finally to the West, into her fascinating portrait. . . Factory Girls is a keen-eyed look at contemporary Chinese life composed of equal parts of new global realties, timeless stories of human striving, and intelligent storytelling at its best.”
–San Francisco Chronicle
“Both entertaining and poignant. . . Chang’s fine prose and her keen sense of detail more than compensate for the occasional digression, and her book is an intimate portrait of a strange and hidden landscape.”
–The New Yorker--This text refers to the Kindle Edition edition.
“A compelling, atmospheric look at seldom-seen China.”
–BusinessWeek
“Chang, a journalist at the Wall Street Journal, spent two years reporting in the gritty southern boomtown of Dongguan trying to put human faces on these workers, and the ones she finds are extraordinary. They are, more than anything else, the face of modern China: a country increasingly turning away from its rural roots and turbulent past and embracing a promising but uncertain future. . . The painstaking work Chang put into befriending these girls and drawing out their stories is evident, as is the genuine affection she has for them and their spirit.”
–Time
“In her impressive new book, Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China, former Wall Street Journal reporter Leslie T. Chang explores this boom that's simultaneously emptying China's villages of young people and fueling its economic growth. . . To be sure, this mass migration is a big and well-told story. But Chang brings to it a personal touch: her own forebears were migrants, and she skillfully weaves through the narrative tales of their border crossings. She also succeeds in grounding the trend in wider social context, suggesting that the aspirations of these factory girls signal a growing individualism in China's socialist culture.”
–Newsweek
“Elegant. . . Chang is less interested in exposé than in getting to know the young women of Dongguan’s assembly lines. Factory Girls reveals the workplace through the workers’ eyes.”
–Financial Times
“A real coup. . . Chang, a former Beijing correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, does more than describe harsh factory conditions. She writes about the way the workers themselves see migration, bringing us views that are rarely heard. Factory Girls is highly readable and even amusing in many places, despite the seriousness of the subject. In the pages of this book, these factory girls come to life.”
–Christian Science Monitor
“Amazing. . . a fascinating ethnography of the young women who labor in the factories of Guangdong, China’s richest province, a land of boomtowns where wealth and scams and exploitation and warmth and courage all abound. . . I must have read fifty books about China this year, but this stands out as one of the best.”
–Boingboing.net
“A gifted storyteller, Chang crafts a work of universal relevance.”
–Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“In-depth reporting [that] contributes significantly to our knowledge about China’s development.”
–Kirkus Reviews
“Rising head and shoulders above almost all other new books about China, this unflinching and yearningly compassionate portrait of the lives and loves of ordinary Chinese workers is quite unforgettable: it presents the first long, hard look we have ever taken at the people who are due to become, before very much longer, the new masters of the world.”
–Simon Winchester, author of The Man Who Loved China
“Often people ask me, ‘What’s it like for women in China today?’ From now on I'll recommend Leslie Chang’s Factory Girls, which is brilliant, thoughtful, and insightful. This book is also for anyone who's ever wondered how their sneakers, Christmas ornaments, toys, designer clothes, or computers are made. The stories of these factory girls are not only mesmerizing, tragic, and inspiring -- true examples of persistence, endurance, and loneliness -- but Chang has also woven in her own family’s history, shuttling north and south through China to examine this complicated country’s past, present, and future.”
–Lisa See, author of Snow Flower and the Secret Fan
Product Description
An eye-opening and previously untold story, Factory Girls is the first look into the everyday lives of the migrant factory population in China.
China has 130 million migrant workers—the largest migration in human history. In Factory Girls, Leslie T. Chang, a former correspondent for the Wall Street Journal in Beijing, tells the story of these workers primarily through the lives of two young women, whom she follows over the course of three years as they attempt to rise from the assembly lines of Dongguan, an industrial city in China’s Pearl River Delta.
As she tracks their lives, Chang paints a never-before-seen picture of migrant life—a world where nearly everyone is under thirty; where you can lose your boyfriend and your friends with the loss of a mobile phone; where a few computer or English lessons can catapult you into a completely different social class. Chang takes us inside a sneaker factory so large that it has its own hospital, movie theater, and fire department; to posh karaoke bars that are fronts for prostitution; to makeshift English classes where students shave their heads in monklike devotion and sit day after day in front of machines watching English words flash by; and back to a farming village for the Chinese New Year, revealing the poverty and idleness of rural life that drive young girls to leave home in the first place. Throughout this riveting portrait, Chang also interweaves the story of her own family’s migrations, within China and to the West, providing historical and personal frames of reference for her investigation.
A book of global significance that provides new insight into China, Factory Girls demonstrates how the mass movement from rural villages to cities is remaking individual lives and transforming Chinese society, much as immigration to America’s shores remade our own country a century ago.
About the Author
Leslie T. Chang lived in China for a decade as a correspondent for the Wall Street Journal. She is married to Peter Hessler, who also writes about China. She lives in Colorado.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
1 Going Out
When you met a girl from another factory, you quickly took her measure. What year are you? you asked each other, as if speaking not of human beings but of the makes of cars. How much a month? Including room and board? How much for overtime? Then you might ask what province she was from. You never asked her name.
To have a true friend inside the factory was not easy. Girls slept twelve to a room, and in the tight confines of the dorm it was better to keep your secrets. Some girls joined the factory with borrowed ID cards and never told anyone their real names. Some spoke only to those from their home provinces, but that had risks: Gossip traveled quickly from factory to village, and when you went home every auntie and granny would know how much you made and how much you saved and whether you went out with boys.
When you did make a friend, you did everything for her. If a friend quit her job and had nowhere to stay, you shared your bunk despite the risk of a ten-yuan fine, about $1.25, if you got caught. If she worked far away, you would get up early on a rare day off and ride hours on the bus, and at the other end your friend would take leave from work--this time, the fine one hundred yuan--to spend the day with you. You might stay at a factory you didn't like, or quit one you did, because a friend asked you to. Friends wrote letters every week, although the girls who had been out longer considered that childish. They sent messages by mobile phone instead.
Friends fell out often because life was changing so fast. The easiest thing in the world was to lose touch with someone.
The best day of the month was payday. But in a way it was the worst day, too. After you had worked hard for so long, it was infuriating to see how much money had been docked for silly things: being a few minutes late one morning, or taking a half day off for feeling sick, or having to pay extra when the winter uniforms switched to summer ones. On payday, everyone crowded the post office to wire money to their families. Girls who had just come out from home were crazy about sending money back, but the ones who had been out longer laughed at them. Some girls set up savings accounts for themselves, especially if they already had boyfriends. Everyone knew which girls were the best savers and how many thousands they had saved. Everyone knew the worst savers, too, with their lip gloss and silver mobile phones and heart-shaped lockets and their many pairs of high-heeled shoes.
The girls talked constantly of leaving. Workers were required to stay six months, and even then permission to quit was not always granted. The factory held the first two months of every worker's pay; leaving without approval meant losing that money and starting all over somewhere else. That was a fact of factory life you couldn't know from the outside: Getting into a factory was easy. The hard part was getting out.
The only way to find a better job was to quit the one you had. Interviews took time away from work, and a new hire was expected to start right away. Leaving a job was also the best guarantee of getting a new one: The pressing need for a place to eat and sleep was incentive to find work fast. Girls often quit a factory in groups, finding courage in numbers and pledging to join a new factory together, although that usually turned out to be impossible. The easiest thing in the world was to lose touch with someone.
